We're all gloomed

Hong Kong seems to have been living in grey and white for months. No blue sky days to lift the gloom. I have done trips to Dubai and Korea this week. The former was 35 degrees Celsius and the latter zero degrees. Seoul had its coldest April day for 45 or 100 years, depending on your informant. All I know is that I arrived in good health and left with a chest cough and sore throat.

I was looking forward to unpacking my new camera when I arrived home. The sense of anticipation was not especially high as the new version is not dramatically different from the old one but does perform better in certain key areas such as auto focus, noise levels etc. What I had not bargained for was a second new camera courtesy of Mrs. Ha, bless her cotton socks.

She decided that I needed a new Leica as my old one is now a mere 51 years old and takes that strange old stuff called film. Well whoever it was who allegedly said of I am a Camera, "Me no Leica", I am sorry, me Leica very much. A brand spanking new black M9 with a stunning F0.95 Noctilux lens was waiting to be trialed. So this weekend the Canon has been much neglected and the Leica has been in constant use. And what better conditions can you ask for to test a low light speciality lens than Hong Kong Gloom.

For those who are not already asleep at more camera-porn the M9 is a digital rangefinder. It has no autofocus and in sum it is dramatically simpler than a multi menu, multi custom function modern Nikon or Canon DSLR. It also takes amazing pictures. The clarity and crispness is probably unparalleled and it has a full frame sensor with no crop factor. It also weighs a fraction of the amount of a pro DSLR and as I am using a 50mm lens, albeit quite a hefty one, this is a fraction of what I normally sling over my shoulder on a tripod. As this is supposed to be about birds and / or bugs here is an example of a shot taken with the new toy at F1.4, ISO 200, 1/1500 sec. The sharpness and colour are astounding.




By the way, this is a captive bird and not on the Hong Kong official list. It was seen outside Harrods.

The next shot shows the colour rendition and brightness in poor light.




And finally, to keep vaguely on the nature theme, our dog.



But the real bonuses this weekend were finding a Little bunting in the communal garden and seeing a flock of 64 Chinese goshawks migrating over the house. They were very, very high so this shot with the new Canon and a mere 400mm lens is no more than a record shot.




I suspect these birds were from Po Toi, where a major influx had been sighted by Geoff Welch earlier this week or they may just have been a smaller, later flock. Either way, it was sheer coincidence that I happened to be outside at the time and spotted, first, one, then two, then three then the big flock coming together over Shan Liu.

And if you can't tell one bunting from another, this is the Little bunting.



So even when the skies are grey we can still put on a happy face.

A grand night out or "It would be rude not to..."

The Three Men were not in a boat but in a dark wooded area somewhere in the hills behind Sai Kung. We started chez moi, where Mrs. Ha provided pumpkin soup and beef stroganoff sloshed down with green tea. The cool box was filled with fruit, water, some fizzy poison-ishy stuff and dare I say, beer. When I returned home at 1am everything was untouched. Except the beer.

We drove up to a clearing where we set up the lights and we waited. The weather was on the cool side of pleasantly warm. Or if you prefer, the warm side of pleasantly cool. It was dry over one trap and mizzly over the other. They were barely 50m apart. There was very little wind. In fact this was ideal moth weather. Around us the Brainfever bird called incessantly. Collared scops owls hooted and R swore he heard a Slaty-breasted rail. We were so remote that in the 5-6 hours we were on site not a car passed and not a soul walked past us. The only people likely to have done so were the boys in blue to be honest.

We had our regulation dull coloured clothing on except for M who had escaped from Stalag Luft Mandarin O and deserted his wife for the evening. Good man! The pale blue sweater was a great disguise.



And it attracted moths too.

Now I have to point out that R & M are rather expert with the leps, whilst I am a bumbling amateur. But be that as it may, we all set about the traps with equal gusto and the cameras were produced to keep digital records of the evening's catch. Occasionally, just occasionally, a particularly fine specimen would solicit a different reaction. The option existed not just to photograph the beasts but also to give them a more tangible chance of fame. Out would come a small plastic tube or pot and well, "it would be rude not to....."

Here are just a few of the close to 200 species seen yesterday evening.







I think it is fair to say that squeamishness and moths don't go hand in hand. They do tend to get in your hair, on your limbs, down your shirt, up your trouser leg and as poor old Colin Plant in VC 20 once discovered, they can dance a fine tarantella on your ear drum. How many men can boast of having been hospitalized by a Flame Shoulder? The trick is to make sure that all of the moths have been removed before you crawl into bed with your spouse in the early hours of the morning. I can testify from past experience that beetles are no more welcome in our marital bed than moths and I have NO idea how it got there!!

We ambled from trap to trap for about 5 hours, barely noticing the dampness of the air increasing. Some may have called it drizzle but we were too absorbed in doing a final check for exciting species. And the glorious thing about moths is that the small ones can be every bit as challenging and indeed beautiful as the big brutes. We had only one break and that was for R & M to savour the beer that reaches the moths other beers cannot reach. Somewhere R has a photo of a moth trying to sip a little for itself. I haven't seen the photo yet but I think the intruder was Plutodes flavescens.

Finally we did decide to pack down. The evening was over, camaraderie had reigned supreme, fine moths had been sampled, though net in the gourmetic sense, and all went home happy.......... with the exception of those lucky specimens, whose proud families may return one day to see their fallen relatives preserved for posterity.

If you think moth-ing is potentially for you (and you should, by jove) keep an eye out for National Moth Night. I am serious. There will be public sessions open even to the lowest of the riff-raff (that includes me) and you might even have time for a beer.

Cheers!

Moths are dull looking brown things - NOT

I am still checking whether this is Argina astrea or A. argus but whichever, it is a cracking moth! Enjoy.

Bonus bird

Amateurish Photography

Anybody who has followed my intermittent blogging may recall that my first camera was a Brownie Cresta 3. I used this for a while before being given my father's old Leica M3. From the ridiculous to the sublime! I moved through Canon SLRs to DSLRs and that is what I generally use today. I had a very brief dream of being a photo-journalist but the Career's Officer at school persuaded me that university was a good route to go and by the time I graduated I had drifted out of photography with any real intent. I have often dabbled but never seriously. I have recently begun to think about the world after work and taken my photography a little more seriously in the sense that I self-critique more. I delete more aggressively those images that are mediocre. I think more about light, exposure, composition and of course content. It is my sole creative outlet. My father was musical. He played piano well and as a boy was broadcast on the old Third Programme as his voice was compared to that of Ernest Lough. He loved the human voice and was a huge admirer of Kathleen Ferrier. I don't recall what sparked his interest in photography but he taught me to process my own black and white films and the bathroom served as a darkroom.

The book that started me thinking about photography differently was National Geographic - The Photographs. The haunting eyes of The Afghan Girl, captured for immortality by Steve McCurry, really gripped me. I still dream of taking such an iconic image. Look at Steve McCurry's blog to see just what a fine artist he is. But that was years ago and against all advice I tried to photograph birds instead. I had started birdwatching semi-seriously in the early 1990s as an antidote to The City. A professional bird photographer told me early on that you can't be a bird watcher and a bird photographer. Either or but not both. They are not compatible. I have spent 10 years trying to prove him wrong.

This week I spent a delightful morning at Mai Po (see previous post) and was then invited to join J&J to look for a nocturnal bird, Savanna nightjar. This was preceded by a potter around Long Valley and some tantalising views of Painted snipe, a bird I see regularly but which refuses point blank to strut its stuff in the open for me. So I end up with what I call "bird-in-habitat" shots and for which others have a different word. Birdwatching can take you to some odd places and so it was that we sought out the nightjar at what J assured me was the old grenade range. Happily this is a fairly off-the-beaten-track sort of place so little chance of young Johnny stepping on unexploded ordnance. Did I hear his mother whisper "shame"? As the light faded the calls started, described in the book as "a single piercing 'chweep' at short intervals". And then the first bird rose up. The silhouette of a nightjar is highly distinctive, like a flying anchor, almost falcon like. They are enchanting to watch but trying to get an autofocus to work in fading light is tricky and eventually (and too late) I switched to manual. Looking through the viewfinder of a camera you lose track rather of all that is happening but I guess there were 5 or six birds. They circled around and then moved away, hunting for their evening breakfast. Their whole performance lasted barely 10 minutes and I took 5 photographs. Two missed the bird completely, one was too small in the frame and the other two, though sharper were still in need of a decent crop to produce reasonable sized pictures. As J kindly said, "not bad for a first attempt". I think that is known as being damned with faint praise but he was right.

It is always more than somewhat depressing to review the images on the laptop when I get home. Invariably I find most of them destined for the trash basket. Some I hang on to in the hope that over time they will look better but without fail they look worse. DELETE! And so I need to do something different. Benjamin Franklin said, it is alleged, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Already I have a couple of great suggestions from web-gurus.

The one I like best is from David duChemin at Pixelated Image.

It says: Stop buying new gear. That's it.

He does then continue and demand that instead you go out and take more pictures. Simple isn't it. Spending money or spending time practising. Hmmmm. Why did I just order that new Canon 1D mkIV body?

I have bought a couple of his $5 e-Books (does that count as buying gear?) and they are full of good ideas but the message I particularly liked is:

"Waiting is also a much under-rated photographic skill. Be patient, watch what happens, and be ready when it does. Don’t settle for good when waiting a few minutes might give you something truly revealing or great."

This is all about Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". In simple terms one moment is better than another and the difference may be a fraction of a second. In bird photography this is especially true. The turn of a head and the contact is lost, the catchlight in the eye is gone, the light has changed and on occasions, the bird flown. Portraits are nice, action shots are better. Action shots with a story to tell are better still. Sitting in a hide at Mai Po I often struggle with the conflict between singling out a bird and waiting for it to do something interesting or looking at the landscape and trying to catch the action as it happens. If I go for the latter I often find the bird I had, literally, been focussing on has gone. Such are the dilemmas of the photographer's life.

I am also learning about how much more Photoshop can do. Processing is an art in itself. But that's another blog. I'm off to take a load of images.

IMAGES TO CRITIQUE.......



Gloomy Day in Sai Kung




Savanna nightjar




Yellow-bellied prinia




Female Painted snipe